Intro Page Help

[Doug32]

I'm about to upload my first site and I wonder if

someone could direct me with regards as to how to

include an intro page. I developed my site with dreamweaver/

flash.

[LisaJill]

What you would do is create your index.html as your entrance page, and have an 'enter' type link that goes to your content page, named whatever you want (such as entrance.html or main.html)

 

index.html is the first page that will be delivered, so you create that as your entrance screen and it is what people will see first.

 

does that help?

[Doug32]

Thanks tch Lisa for your reply. Yes it did help, and

It is what I was going to do. However I am concerned

about issues such as google ranking, etc. My understanding

is that a site's index page receives the most attention

with search robots. I thought perhaps there was a better way.

[bellringr]

From what I understand having read these boards, the lack of content and links are what cause problems in rankings with an intro page. Depends on what kind of exposure you're looking for. I have a family site with an intro page so it's no biggie if my rank isn't good. However, I am fortunate enough to have a completely unique name, so when people search on gryfalia (hubby's nick), our index page pops up first.

[kaseytraeger]

Doug32,

 

Lisa is correct. The first page to be viewed in any directory will be the file named index.xxx where .xxx can be .htm, .html, .php, .asp or .jsp depending on which type of coding you're using to create the page.

 

So if someone types the following into their address bar -- www.yoursite.com -- they will actually be reaching the web page located at www.yoursite.com/index.xxx. (You need to be careful not to put more than one index page in each directory. The browser won't know which index file should be displayed.)

 

Similarly, if someone types either of these URLs into their browser address bar -- www.yoursite.com/directoryname OR www.yoursite.com/directoryname/ -- they will reach the page located at www.yoursite.com/directoryname/index.xxx.

 

OK, so about search engine placement. This is a very important topic, for obvious reasons. There are as many hypotheses about how to get the best search engine ranking possible as there are people who have thought about this issue.

 

I know of at least one topic in the forums here that have discussed this issue at great length. You can find that topic here -- http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forums/i...?showtopic=8352 -- it's a discussion about getting listed in DMOZ. Here's another topic about meta tags -- http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forums/i...?showtopic=8676.

 

You might also like to check out a web site called "Search Engine Optimization Strategies" (www.searchenginestrategies.biz). It is basically a large, how-to resource completely dedicated to optimizing your web site for search engines.

 

Basically, I think it's important ot make sure you have accurate, descriptive keywords. You should also try to use important phrases as often as you can in the index page of your web site without sounding silly. Search engines look at a variety of things, most notably the actual content of your site -- not your markup tags. So if you can do a good job of providing good, accurate, descriptive content, you'll go a long way towards helping getting listed, ranked, and indexed in Yahoo! and Google.

 

Once you've worked up your index page properly, it's always a good idea to do the same thing to the rest of the pages in your site.

 

After that, submit your pages directly to Google and Yahoo!. This is simply a request that they send out their spiders/bots to crawl your web site. Once their spiders have crawled your site, you should get indexed in that particular search engine no problem.

 

To make sure that the search engine spiders can crawl your site effectively, you may wish to create a robots.txt file. Although not required, many search engine spiders will first look for the robots.txt file in the root of the domain to see where they can crawl. Here is a good source for learning about robots.txt files -- www.searchengineworld.com/robots/robots_tutorial.htm

 

This should be a fair amount of information to get you going. Have fun, and good luck getting your site indexed and crawled!!!